I am going to go ahead and do something that I generally try to avoid with this site. I am going to temporarily disregard the parental content in a game and just focus on the game itself. This is going to be a discussion about Watch_Dogs, because I believe it is an excellent way to mentally prepare ourselves as gamers (or people who know gamers) for what to expect at E3, for the rest of the year, and for a decent amount of time after that. Watch_Dogs is a victim in an unwinnable game, a game that will claim more than just one victim before we can put it to rest.

Before I explain how what happened to Watch_Dogs affects the entire gaming industry, please allow me to take a moment to rant about the game. The developers had a great opportunity here and never really delivered. Watch_Dogs is a good game, definitely worth playing, but that’s all it ever really is. It’s unfair to compare this game to the Grand Theft Autos since Rockstar has had years to develop and perfect the art of creating a gritty yet funny open world third person shooter experience. It’s like comparing the movie Gladiator to another director’s first film. The first film can be absolutely amazing, but it’ll never shine a candle to the greatness of Gladiator. That being said, I really expected more from this game. I keep comparing Watch_Dogs to Split/Second. Split/Second is this ridiculously arcadey racing game where you fill an energy meter by doing stuff like drifting, drafting, and getting huge air. You can then use that energy to activate stuff in the level in the hopes of wrecking your opponents. There’s a ton of small stuff that blows up, like buses and cars. Random debris falls from the sky and it’s all based in the level that you’re racing. If you save up your energy, though, that’s when the real magic happens. There are certain sections on every course where you can cause a massive change that has the potential of wrecking everyone. You can bring down a huge space needle tower that creates an alternate, faster route. You can cause an entire dam to collapse. Or you can call in a C130 that crashlands on the runway you’re racing down.

Need for Speed has nothing on this.

Split/Second is a game that is, as a whole, just good. It isn’t a great racing game, it has some pretty simple exploits, and some of its alternate game modes were pretty frustrating. That being said, its explosions and levolution events were unparalleled. It takes one thing that it does well and cranks it up to eleven. I will always remember Split/Second because of the visual impact of the player-triggered events and how those events could change the track in dramatic ways. Watch_Dogs never has that moment. The hacking was supposed to be like that, but you never feel all-powerful. I wanted it to be like Prototype. In Prototype, you’d be given a task to go and annihilate an enemy base. When you got that assignment, you were never concerned with whether or not you’d be able to kill the enemies, you always could. You’re just that freakin powerful. The only thing I thought when I was given a task was “How do I want to kill everyone this time?” You are a one-man killing machine, you will make everyone in the Red Zone fear you and with good reason. But this wasn’t entirely the Watch_Dogs’ developers fault. There were a ton of forces working against them, forces that leash almost every current triple-A development studio in existence. First, let’s start with the obvious, the marketing. There have been a number of reviews that talk about how Watch_Dogs’ marketing was too good. They compare it to Dead Island. After all, the job of a marketing team is to sell copies, and Watch_Dogs’ marketing did exactly that. So this is an excellent marketing team that did exactly what they were supposed to do. Except that isn’t the case. A good game manager knows that marketing isn’t just about selling copies. The primary job of video game marketing and public relations is to control consumer expectations. You want consumers to get excited about the product you’re selling, but they have to be getting excited about the product that you’re actually selling. It’s an extremely fine line that few companies manage to tread correctly. I’m not saying the marketing team has to be 100% honest, they just have to make sure not to completely mislead the consumer. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a perfect example of this. At E3 2011, Gearbox showed off amazing single player gameplay footage with awesome dialog and character interactions, great visuals and visual effects, and very intelligent alien AI. What got released two years later was a steaming pile of crap that wasn’t even close to what was shown by the marketing teams. This was a case that was almost blatantly deceptive. It’s the most extreme example I can come up with.

It's probably better that he didn't have to suffer through the rest of the game.

But if Gearbox announces at this E3 that they’re coming out with a sequel for Aliens: Colonial Marines, would I preorder it? Hell no! Gearbox had their shot to prove to me that they could pull off a good Aliens game and they missed it by a mile. And there are plenty of other examples where this is the case. Watch_Dogs is, unfortunately, another game that fits into that same category. The marketing team had one job to do, get me excited about Watch_Dogs. They got me excited, but not for Watch_Dogs. They failed. Fortunately, that situation is fairly unique for Watch_Dogs. There are plenty of other games with flashy, pre-rendered cutscenes that will show up at E3, selling an experience that isn’t actually mirrored in the game, but most of the time these videos are forgotten after the game is released. The problems with this game were compounded by the fact that the developers made a brand new engine for this game. Any game engine is problematic. Improvements and updates are constantly being generated, but that means that the stability of the engine can sometimes be questionable. When an individual game is unstable, it stops consumers from playing it. When a game engine is unstable, it stops the entire development team from working. New game engines are especially prone to these types of issues, which can bring even the simplest tasks to a grinding halt. This new game engine has its benefits, otherwise the developers wouldn’t have worked with it. However, it is almost certain that most of the major bug and performance related issues in Watch_Dogs are a direct result of the new engine. When I first installed the game on my work computer, which runs an AMD graphics card, it blue screened on launch. It then continued to blue screen until I downloaded beta graphics card drivers. It took me nearly a full day to get the game running at all. My NVidia card at home wasn’t much better. While it didn’t have a problem with blue screening, the performance on the game was absolutely horrendous. The stuttering shown in almost all of my video clips from the game was something that happened every time I drove around the city. I ran the game at a mix of high and low settings, far below what my computer can handle with other open world games. Yet despite the fact that the game wasn’t nearly as graphically impressive as titles like GTA4 and Skyrim, the game was still giving me framerate drops every few seconds. Most of these issues are solved over time. Performance tweaks and engine upgrades can dramatically improve the visual quality and framerate. But these types of issues are solved after years of development with the engine. Even engines like the Unreal Engine or Frostbite have quirks that the developers have to work around in order to get the best performing, most stable game possible. But the real problem with Watch_Dogs is that it was developed for six different platforms. SIX! You might be arguing right now, “But Carmine, it’s not actually that bad! The PS3 and PS4 are relatively similar since they’re both made by Sony! Same with the Xbox 360 and the X1!” Sit down and let me explain to you exactly what goes on in game development. Consoles are currently divided up between “Gen3” and “Gen4”. Gen3 is the PS3 and Xbox 360, Gen4 is the PS4 and X1. PC is in its own separate category since the hardware can vary drastically from computer to computer, and the Wii U is some sort of horrible hybrid between Gen3 and Gen4. I’ll get to that Frankenstein of a console in a bit. First, just because two consoles are made by the same company doesn’t mean they’re even remotely similar. For Gen3, the PS3 has less memory than the Xbox 360, which means that a game being developed for Gen3 has to be tested extensively on the PS3. Even if the Xbox 360 can handle a few more polygons or a few more animations, developers aren’t going to make that happen because the PS3 would crash out. Every time your console freezes, that’s a crash, and most of the time it’s because of a lack of memory. If a PC starts running out of free memory, the PC starts lagging. It’s designed to deal with situations where it’s running low on memory since it’s built to multitask. The consoles don’t. They’re either going all in with a game or they’re dead in the water. Yes, you can make a console lag, but it’s a lot more difficult than making a PC lag. For the Gen4 consoles, the X1 has slightly less memory. It isn’t much, and I have a feeling that most of it has to do with the Kinect, but the X1 is more likely to have issues with performance than the PS4. So when developers are testing their game on Gen4, they have to test fairly extensively on the X1. But right now developers are in a bit of a conundrum. They’re developing games with huge budgets. They want to make new titles for the Gen4 consoles, since those consoles have far more memory and are far more powerful. Unfortunately, most of their user base is still on Gen3 consoles. So developers have to create two entirely separate experiences. Now, a decent developer would look at a game like Watch_Dogs and say “We could probably run this game without any problems if we cut out these buildings, removed this island, and removed the ability to use grenade launchers. Unfortunately, the internet would light them ablaze so quickly the devs would be burnt to a crisp before anyone knew what was going on. So the devs spend months doing performance tests and manipulating memory levels for different categories. It’s a slow, painful process that can be thrown off by the smallest issue. Seriously, the smallest thing can cause an out-of-memory crash. One too many polygons, one texture that’s slightly too high of resolution, too many objects being visible on the screen at any one time. It turns game development into a sort of development hell that isn’t fun for anyone. And while the engineers and developers are spending hour after hour, week after week slaving away to keep the game from crashing every two seconds on the PS3, other platforms are getting much less love. Gen3 gets the highest priority, since that’s where the most consumers are. Gen4 gets the next highest priority, since that’s where consumers are going to go next. So who does that leave? Well, first, it leaves the PC gamers. Hey PC gamers, ever wonder why you guys always get the shaft when it comes to buggy releases? There’s a few great reasons why this happens. First, there’s no certification process for PC. Console games have to get checked by a quality assurance team at either Microsoft or Sony. Publishers submit a game to the console manufacturers, and the manufacturers run that game through its paces. If Sony or Microsoft get any game-breaking issues, they kick that sucker back to the publishers and force it to get fixed. It’s not a perfect system, but it catches almost all of the major issues before they go out the door. PC doesn’t have a single manufacturer. There’s no gatekeeper right now. So the game that gets propped on Steam or Origin or Uplay only takes a few days to prepare and only requires an internal QA approval. Watch_Dogs was an obvious victim of this problem. This game blue screened my work PC four times before I managed to fix the issue myself. It’s absolutely ridiculous, but that’s the unfortunate plight of PC gamers. You want to know the only platform that is ignored more than the PC? That’s right, it’s the Wii U. The Wii U is more powerful than its Gen3 counterparts but doesn’t have the sheer power that a PS4 or X1 packs. It’s in its own sort of middle territory. I really don’t understand why Ubisoft wanted to release Watch_Dogs on the Wii U. It requires developers using special tools to port the game over, a dedicated QA team to recheck the entire game for bugs, and then a boatload of engineers to make sure the game is stable enough for launch. I believe that the one reason why the Wii U version of Watch_Dogs won’t come out for a few more months is because the development process for that console is so ridiculously complicated compared to the Sony or Microsoft platforms that the game code has to get rechecked line by line. And, unfortunately, these problems aren’t unique for Watch_Dogs. All of the time that developers spend stabilizing their Gen3 versions is time they’re not spending working on the Gen4 and PC versions. Just watch this year at E3, the games that come out on Gen4 are not only going to look better, but they’re going to be more stable and have better features than the games that come out on both Gen3 and Gen4. If you want a benchmark, compare Halo 4 to Halo 5. I’m sure we’ll get some gameplay footage of Halo 5, and I’m sure it’ll feature something that we haven’t seen at all in a previous Halo game. Maybe bigger worlds with more enemy and friendly AI battling it out together or levolution or something huge like that. I’m getting excited for E3 this year. It’s only a few days away now. So stick with me and we’ll see what looks awesome. I’m going back again this year, so if there’s anything in particular you want me to report on let me know.